NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 outed

It would seem our buddies at HardOCP have the scoop on some upcoming NVIDIA hardware: the 9800 GX2 card. According to Kyle's information, the card sports a pair of G92-based GPUs with 128 SPs each on two separate PCBs. It also appears to have a total of 1GB of memory on-board and will be the new "flagship" card from NVIDIA taking the highest priced spot from the 8800 Ultra card.

The HardOCP page also says that "Quad SLI" will be supported once again (lord help us all) and that the card should be seen in late February or early March.

Nothing is known of the power usage of the card: how much it draws or even how many power connections it has on it

Since it is G92-based, we can assume that it will have the same 256-bit memory bus that the 8800 GT and 8800 GTS 512 cards sport

No word yet on clock speeds, shader clocks or anything like that yet

Josh's Update: Now that we have some real pictures of the card and some basic specifications, we can also speculate on some more info. If you remember the older 7950 GX2 was based on the same G71 chip that the 7900 GTX used. The 7900 GTX was clocked at 650 MHz and had a double slot cooler, while the GX2 with its two chips were clocked at a rather conservative 500 MHz. Even though these were the "mobile spec'd" G71, the card still pulled quite a bit of power and put out quite a bit of heat. When we consider that the partially disabled 8800 GT is fairly power efficient, but puts out heat like a warehouse fire in a single slot configuration... I am pretty confident that NVIDIA will do just as they did with the 7950 and clock the cards down to the 500 MHz level (and certainly not much higher than 525 MHz). These are full G92 chips with the 128 working SPs, and I would imagine that the shader cores would be clocked at around the 1500 MHz level. We can also bet that NVIDIA will utilize 900 MHz GDDR-3, as it is in great supply at very good prices. So, that would give approximately 115 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. NVIDIA will likely say that the card pulls around 190 watts at full bore, but from the pictures it looks as if the cooling is going to be far more robust than the older 7950 GX2 and it's two small fans/heatsinks.

The best way to think of the GeForce 9800 GX2 card is as an 8800 GPU
that has been die shrunk to 65nm and placed in an SLI configuration in
a "single" card. The 9800 GX2 is very reminiscent of 7950 GX2
of days past. (And we loved the 7950 GX2 at launch, but terrible
support and diminishing returns soon painted it as one of NVIDIA’s
biggest failures since the 5800 series.)